If there’s a word to sum up Season 6 of Slow Horses, it’s brutal. After all, this season of the Apple TV drama found former and current Slough House agents being hunted and killed left and right, meaning that we lost more than a few of our favorites.
But is MI5’s intrepid River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) one of them?
That’s certainly possible given the way he collapses in the last moments of the Season 6 finale — knowingly titled “Judgement Day” — after being beaten, bruised, and nearly killed across the preceding episodes. While the show has already been renewed for two more seasons, which will once again adapt Mick Herron‘s Joe Country and Slough House novels, the writers have been known to veer off in their own directions. (And perhaps the rumors of Lowden becoming the next James Bond have something to do with River’s future being left in a gray area.)
According to Gaby Chiappe, co-executive producer and Season 6 head writer who penned the finale, you have to look back to an earlier episode to fully understand what happened to River. Gold Derby got the details on what scene she’s referring to, as well as her decision to put the curmudgeonly (and often gassy) Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) in the middle of a swanky children’s party, and keep the villainous Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving) alive while others — like Emma Flyte (Ruth Bradley) — perished.
Gold Derby: The idea to have Lamb at a children’s party is just brilliant. Where did that come from since his meeting with Natasha Carrington (Zrinka Cvitešić) could have happened anywhere?
Gaby Chiappe: It was a genius idea, but it wasn’t mine. It was Sophie Goodhart, who wrote Episodes 3 and 5. We said we needed something kind of mad, and she came up with that. When she said it, you just thought, “Oh God, that’s so brilliant. What a gift.”
So much of the episode takes place inside, and then outside, of Taverner’s country house. Did that make it a longer-than-usual shoot?
We spent quite a long time there, and it’s an amazing house in an amazing location. Oddly, I don’t know if they usually do this, but the season was shot pretty chronologically so that very big chunk were the last days of the shoot.
That sequence also includes the bulk of the cast, and it’s always fun seeing them all in one place. How was that to shoot with everyone except Gary there?
As you say, it’s not very common, so when it does happen, it’s more often been in Slough House with a bunch of people in Lamb’s office or something. With the addition of Lenny Rush, who played Reese, the sense of it as a dysfunctional family feels even more potent because there’s a teenager in it now. I got the feeling they really relished it and really enjoyed playing off each other. They’ve been working together for so long, and they really enjoy each other and admire and respect each other. Just watching them fire off each other was fantastic.
Speaking of Lenny Rush, he is such a great addition and I hope we see him again. Did you see right away what he could bring to this season?
He was a conflation of two characters because this season was a conflation of two novels. There is a teenager in one of them, and we were having to lose quite a lot of the story that that teenager belonged to in order to make the story feel organic. But the idea of a teenager was really appealing and one of the producers, Julian Stevens, had worked with Lenny before and suggested him. Once he’d said it, everybody thought, “Yeah, that would be so brilliant.” And indeed it was.
Tell me what the conversations are like when you guys talk about characters dying, because we lost Coe (Tom Brooke) in Episode 4 and then Emma Flyte is killed in Episode 6, sadly.
Those deaths are directly from the books. We haven’t killed — and we wouldn’t kill — anyone that doesn’t die in the books. Because these two novels were melded together, the deaths happen in a slightly different way, but I think the spirit of them is retained from the book. Emma Flyte dies protecting others, which is very much how it happens in the book. In the book, she’s not shot by Frank Harkness but that felt like the most meaningful death we could give her in our structure. It was also a good thing to give Frank just in case you were getting sentimental about him.
But it really does matter to us, and it matters to the actors and it clearly matters to the viewers. A number of people who I know well — and also not so well! — have been texting me going, “You killed Coe! What were you thinking?” And I’m like, “Well, to be fair, Mick Herron killed him first.” I feel a little bit like I was just following orders, but you do get to really feel for the characters and they matter to you. When they die, I hope it does matter to people because it shouldn’t feel like, “Oh well.” It’s not that kind of show. It does kill people so you never feel safe; you never know who’s going to survive, but it should always matter. The deaths always matter.
River has the chance to kill his father, but doesn’t. He lets him go after they have their conversation towards the end of the episode. How was that the same or different from the books?
That scene doesn’t exist in the book, but I don’t think anybody could believe River shooting Frank at close range, face to face. Also, River’s not in a state to pursue him, but Frank’s pretty beat up at that point. He’s letting him go, but where’s he gonna go? We don’t know. It’s Frank. He could live to fight another day, but you never know with him. It felt like the most appropriate end for that scene.
Before Harkness leaves, he tells River to look to his now-deceased Granddad (Jonathan Pryce) for his education. Is that hinting at a future story?
What River’s kind of saying is, “It would have been great to have a father who was something other than a psychopathic killer.” And because River so idolizes his grandfather, Frank says, “You should take a look at him — that will complete your education in a hurry,” which is a line from the book. We’ve had lots of hints of this before that David Cartwright was a loving grandfather to River, but somewhere else in one of the books it says he was up to his cardiganed elbows in blood. He was not a benign, kindly presence; he did bad things and those things have affected quite a lot of people, like Jackson Lamb, for example.
It would make sense that, like River, Frank also grew up with somebody unpleasant as a way to explain how he turned out.
But I think it sort of speaks to the fact that although River thinks he hates Frank, he’s kind of obsessed with him. And Frank behaves as if he cares not at all about River, yet in that scene in the Shake Shack in the fourth episode where he’s talking to Lamb and Lamb says that people have been killing slow horses, Frank says, “Did they get anyone I know?” River’s his first thought, you know? There is a sense in both of them that they are connected; they may think they have contempt for each other, but the picture is a little bit more complicated than that.
In the very last scene, River is setting up these glasses for a little romantic moment with Sid (Olivia Cooke), and he moves the crowbar off the table. Shortly after, his hand shakes and he collapses. Can you explain what has happened to him?
Actually, the groundwork is laid in Episode 2 when Jim and Jane [the assassins played by Kyle Soller and MyAnna Buring] come knocking on the door and River and Sid are hiding. You see Jim looking around and there’s a little bottle lying on the table. He looks around and sees the crowbar that River brought in with him, and we have to assume that he paints it with what’s in the bottle, which — given that there have been nerve agent attacks elsewhere — it’s a Novichok attack.
We had a lot of debate about that. Will people know what it is and what’s happening? It’s taken from the book, but in the book it’s left on a doorknob, which is slightly different. It’s still the idea that something happened in the corner of your eye, but you didn’t quite know what it was. And the assassin who laid it is long dead now.
Backing up, once everyone gets together at the church to toast those they’ve lost, it seems like this group may care about each other — though nobody would ever admit that.
You need to be able to honor the fact that there’s genuine emotion there, but nobody hugs and nobody learns, really. That’s not Slow Horses. You need to be able to undercut it, but it’s more than undercutting it. In the Slow Horses universe that Mick Herron created and that [series creator] Will Smith brought to life so brilliantly for the first five seasons, there is a fine line between tragedy and farce. They exist in the same moment. Nothing is left to stand unchallenged, do you know what I mean? Nobody’s allowed to be fully tragic.
